Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Unlike the little shuttles, Arawn’s ship blazed with light. The door on its side opened, and someone came striding out. Constance knew from the shape of him that it was Arawn, and ignoring the men who followed him out, ignoring Marisol and her own people behind her, she strode swiftly toward him and met him midway.

  “Attacked?” Arawn asked. She could scarcely make out his features in the night.

  “Betrayed,” said Constance. “They turned on us. Milla—”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No. I don’t know. They took her.”

  Arawn’s hands were suddenly on her shoulders, warm. She hadn’t even noticed how cold it had gotten. The weight of his grip seemed to anchor her. “We’ll get her,” he promised. “You stay here. Marisol, take care of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  Constance threw off his arms. “Go now,” she told him. “Bring her back. Tell me the moment you learn anything.” Ignoring Marisol lingering behind her, she strode back to the shuttles.

  The shuttle she had come down in was empty. It remained empty the whole time she sat there. Not even the pilot was inside. Her people were giving her space, as if she needed space, as if she were mourning.

  She could not stop seeing Milla Ivanov as last she had seen the woman, silhouetted against the little light, taking a step out toward the oncoming crowd. And when she shook that image from her mind, she saw Ivan instead, chained to a chair, pale in a pale room and with desperate eyes.

  Arawn returned near dawn, when the air had gone gray, when the rising sun made the sky red.

  He brought with him a man from Isabellon and threw him by the nape of his neck at Constance’s feet to kneel before her on the sand and stone. It took Constance a moment to recognize him as the man with the curly hair who had spoken against her in the town, the same man she had met standing before the graves of his neighbors.

  Marisol’s sucked in breath seemed to come from far away while Constance studied the man. He was bloodied and bruised, keeping one arm tucked close to his ribs, one eye scabbed shut. Impossible to tell if the eye was still there.

  “Tell her what you told me,” Arawn said, and the man bent lower down to the Martian soil.

  “The woman who came out,” the man began, the words slow and thick.

  “Milla Ivanov,” said Constance. “Use her name.”

  “Milla Ivanov,” the man said, and stopped.

  Constance said, “What happened to her?”

  “Dead. She’s dead.”

  Mother, father, and son: all the Ivanovs. Constance had done what the System had failed to do in the end. She’d caused the deaths of the whole family.

  “How?” Constance asked.

  Her shadow fell over the man. He would not look up at her or could not, perhaps.

  “She came out of the house,” he said. “We didn’t know who she was. Huntress, I swear, we didn’t know who she was.”

  “No,” Constance said. “You thought she was me. Tell me how she died.”

  “I don’t know,” said the man. “I didn’t do it. I don’t know how it happened. We took her into the crowd. Some of us had rocks, shovels. We thought a gun might be too loud. We didn’t want your ships to hear. She wasn’t—she was bloody when she came out. She was dead.”

  Hatred made things clear. It removed the obstructions of doubt and fear and caution and put everything into perfect crystal clarity. Constance looked down at the man at her feet and knew that she would kill him. “And her body?”

  The man did not answer, only bowed farther toward the dirt. Arawn said, “No, don’t stop now. This is the best part. Why don’t you tell the Mallt-y-Nos what you did to the body of the wisest woman she knew?”

  The man lifted his head. He looked toward Constance. Perhaps he thought he might be able to appeal to her. Perhaps he simply had no other options.

  “We realized we’d made a mistake,” he said. “We didn’t want you to know. We tried to hide it.”

  “You tried to hide her body,” Constance repeated very quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you hide it?”

  “Everywhere,” said the man. “She’s part of the desert now.”

  Constance tried to picture it: Milla Ivanov dismembered, her blood absorbed by the ground, her slender professor’s hands taken from her wrists to become just another extension of the vast Martian desert. The revolution had devoured one of its mothers.

  She looked down at the man at her feet. When she had met him, he’d said he had lost someone in the System’s first attack on Isabellon. She wondered whom he had lost. Had it been a lover? A friend? A mother? How could he have done this to her when she had stood next to him in sympathy?

  “Kill him,” Constance said, and the man choked, his head falling back to rest on the soil. “And then burn his town. Level it.”

  “With pleasure, Huntress,” Arawn said.

  Marisol followed Constance back toward the shuttle. She did not stop even at the sound of the man’s voice rising on a plea and Arawn’s gun’s retort.

  Was that how Ivan had died? she wondered. Bloody and beaten, with a plea and a gunshot? Constance wondered if that interrogator woman had killed him herself or if she’d left that old soldier to do the deed.

  “What now?” Marisol asked. Her voice was unsteady. She shifted her weight as if to hide that her hands were shaking.

  Constance had meant to rescue Mars, to drive off the System, but it repulsed her now, the idea of staying on this planet where Milla Ivanov had been murdered. The next step in her plan was Luna—No. To hell with her old and outdated plan, to hell with her rigid adherence to a plan of attack that no longer applied, and to hell with the inner planets. She would go somewhere where what she would do would matter. She would face her true enemy directly at last.

  She would go where the System was.

  “We go to Europa,” she said.

  —

  Jupiter, the greatest of the planets, the king of the gods, loomed large in the viewscreen of the Wild Hunt. The System was here. The System would be here. Constance would face them at last and end what she had begun.

  “Keep radio channels open,” Constance ordered as they drifted in closer to the planet and its orbiting moons. “Let me know what kind of chatter you’re getting.”

  The woman at the communications station nodded and fitted the headphones over her ears, listening. Marisol, standing at Constance’s side, leaned in to say, “What are you looking for?”

  “Any System broadcasts,” Constance said. “I doubt they’re using their regular channels, so we have to find what channels they are using now. Anything encrypted is of interest.”

  It was worthwhile to keep an eye out for Anji’s troops as well. Everything Constance had heard indicated that Anji had retreated to Saturn, abandoning Jupiter entirely. But there was always the chance that she still considered Jupiter her territory. Well, if she did, let her come. Constance would show her at last what it meant to betray the Mallt-y-Nos. And of course, if her people could find any sort of communication from Julian, or Christoph even, Constance would be glad—

  “Huntress, we’ve detected something.” A man whose name Constance didn’t know was piloting; his voice was tense.

  Constance came forward immediately. “What is it?”

  “A fleet. There are ships down there, close to the planet.”

  “Whose?”

  The pilot hesitated. “Well?” she asked.

  “They don’t appear to be System,” he said.

  They still might have been Anji’s or Christoph’s, and it meant that Constance still did not know where the System fleet was hidden. “How many ships?”

  “No exact number yet; around a hundred.”

  Fewer than she had. “Try to get in contact with them.”

  She could just see the ships now. They were tiny shadows breaking up the smooth lines of the planet’s clouds. They did not seem to be moving with a purpose but drifting with the tugs and tides of gravity’s pull.
<
br />   “They’re not responding, Huntress,” said the woman at communications. For the life of her, Constance could not remember the woman’s name or even remember having met her before. The same with the pilot. She’d seen his face before, she thought, but she did not know his name. They must have been replacements for crew members who had died. Her dead friends were being replaced by people she did not know.

  “Keep trying,” Constance said, and turned back to the viewscreen.

  Io swung lazily between them and the planet, a circle of black against Jupiter’s swirling reds. The ships drifted slowly, ominously still.

  “Still no response, Huntress.”

  “Get closer,” Constance said, and began to pace.

  “No response,” the woman at the communications station reported. “Actually, they don’t seem to be broadcasting anything at all. I can’t even detect signs of communications between the ships in the fleet.”

  Marisol said uneasily, “Do they even know we’re here?”

  “Huntress, the ships are cold,” the pilot said suddenly.

  “What does that mean?” Constance asked.

  “Their engines are off; they have no power.” He did something at his computer panel, checking something Constance couldn’t see. “Their life support isn’t functioning.”

  “A dead fleet?” Marisol said.

  For a time Constance just looked out at those drifting ships. A dead fleet. No one could survive the cold and airlessness of space. Even if they’d had space suits, they wouldn’t have been able to last for long.

  “Can you access their computers?” Constance asked abruptly.

  Baffled silence. Constance fought down annoyance. Mattie could have done it, she knew. Or Ivan. “All System computers have a back door so that the System can take control of them from a distance,” she said. “Even if that fleet wasn’t System, the System made those ships. Can anyone access their computers from here?”

  Someone cleared his throat. The man at the station to monitor the Wild Hunt’s internal systems met Constance’s glance and said nervously, “I think I can, Huntress.”

  “Do it.”

  It took him a while longer than it should have, longer than it would have taken Mattie or Ivan. Constance knew she should have found other skilled computer technicians early on, separated them out, learned their names. They were useful, and people with their skills were few. But she’d never expected to need to, and there had been so many other things to claim her attention.

  At last the man said, “Huntress, I’m in, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But the computers are wiped clean. There’s nothing on them.”

  “What does that mean?” Marisol wanted to know.

  “It means there’s nothing on them, no data, nothing. They’re…hollow. Like someone burned the ship from the inside out.”

  “What could do that?” Marisol asked, but no one gave her an answer.

  The System, Constance thought. Nothing but the System could have brought destruction so total and complete. A part of her was furious, a part of her elated. The System was here; she was sure of it. She had found them.

  “Can you tell whose ships they were?” Constance asked. They were almost near enough to make out the details of the ships as they drifted.

  “It’s hard to say; the data’s all gone,” the man said.

  “Try,” said Constance. “And turn the life support back on on at least one of the ships; I want to find out what happened to them.” If the computers could tell them nothing, they would have to send a boarding party.

  The man acknowledged her and went back to work. Constance watched the ships come closer and closer, watched the shape of the individual crafts become clear. It was a variety of ship types and classes and planets of origin; this fleet, she was sure, had been rebel, not System.

  One of the ships had a peculiar and distinct shape: a disk with six rays sticking out from its center. It was an old Lunar style, with the rays functioning as engines, but the whole design had been discarded years earlier in favor of more efficient structures. The fanciful and the Terran, Constance knew, had always claimed that that particular type of ship looked like a six-pointed star.

  Ships like that were old and outdated; there were few left in the solar system. Constance had known only one man who still flew one.

  Hadn’t she just been wondering where he was?

  Hadn’t she just been wondering why he hadn’t gotten back in contact with her?

  Here, at last, was her answer.

  “Huntress?” the man said hesitantly with bad news in the heaviness of his voice, but Constance didn’t need him to tell her what she had realized herself. She knew those ships; she knew the shapes of them.

  “This was Julian’s fleet,” she said.

  —

  Althea stepped outside her room and into the Ananke’s long, bending hall.

  She turned and looked down it both ways. Down toward the docking bay, a single mechanical arm was parked on a wobbling base. It did not totally obstruct the hallway—Althea could have slipped around it—but it somehow gave an impression of restriction nonetheless.

  She didn’t want to go toward the docking bay, anyway. Althea turned in the other direction, toward the hallway that led ever deeper into the ship’s heart, and began to walk, her feet almost soundless on the floor.

  She had not gone two paces before there was a hum and a rumble as something weighty rolled over the grated floor. Althea turned. The mechanical arm farther up the hall rolled to a stop.

  When she started to walk again, she heard the rumbling start anew, the mechanical arm tailing her at a constant distance.

  With every step she took, it followed right behind her. When she stopped, it stopped. It moved when she moved, stopped when she stopped, as if it were her own self displaced. It haunted her as closely as a shadow, as perniciously as all the other ghosts on this dead ship haunted her thoughts. If Ananke had wanted, she could have kept track of Althea without Althea knowing, through the cameras spread out over the entire ship. But the mechanical arm followed Althea without subtlety, without caring that Althea knew that it followed. It was not a hunt; it was a threat.

  She diverted into the piloting room when she came to the door rather than continue down that hall.

  The little room was familiar to her, but that familiarity had lost its comfort. A recording of Ivan and Mattie played on a screen to her right with the sound off. Impossible to tell from Ivan’s expression what the context of the message was or to whom it had been sent, but Mattie’s lips moved in soundless speech, speaking urgently, some warning that was going unheard.

  On the main viewscreen was the view from outside the ship. Althea crossed the deck to stand before it and stare out into space.

  The sun was brighter now. Closer.

  “They have gone to Mars,” Ananke said. “I’ll find him on Mars.”

  Althea had nothing to say to that.

  “They’re following the Mallt-y-Nos,” Ananke said. “But they’re a few steps behind. She is no longer on Mars.”

  For a moment Althea envisioned Ananke falling into the sun, burning up, her metal and carbon flesh melting away. The black hole, uncovered, devoured the light offered to it, swallowing the sun, sending the whole solar system into dark and cold eternity.

  “If I offer them her,” said Ananke, “they’ll help me.”

  Althea had to be careful, clever. If she accustomed Ananke to her presence at the base of the ship, if she made Ananke think that there was nothing significant about her going down to the base of her spine, perhaps she would have a chance.

  She turned and left the room.

  “Where are you going?” Ananke asked.

  Althea didn’t answer. Out in the hall, the mechanical arm had gotten closer. Althea ignored it and continued on her path down Ananke’s spine. Ananke appeared in the holographic terminal ahead, her sightless blue eyes fixed on Althea’s face. Althea didn’t meet them. They were no
thing more than an image.

  “I figured out the revolutionaries’ signal,” Ananke said. “When I find them, I can contact them. They’ll answer my call.”

  One foot in front of the other. If Althea kept her paces perfectly even, it was almost calming enough for her to forget the rumble of the mechanical arm right at her back.

  “Do you want to know what the signal is?” Ananke asked.

  It was not all that far to the base of the ship. Althea had measured it once, as she’d learned all of Ananke’s dimensions. She wondered how many paces of her own it would take to go down and back up again.

  Next time around, she decided, she would count them.

  “It’s the barking of hounds,” Ananke said. “A particular sound clip. Listen.”

  It erupted from the speakers before Althea, behind Althea, all up and down the hall: the barking and howling of hounds. It filled the Ananke’s silent passageways and echoed through the dead halls as if the hunt were closing in on Althea, and still she walked up and down that hall.

  —

  It took a very long time to travel in space. On the Wild Hunt and in Constance’s fleet, that was not a big problem. All her ships had relativistic drives and could travel between the inner planets in a matter of days. But Julian’s ships could be boarded only by shuttle, and the kinetic energy of one ship crashing into another was a genuine concern: such a collision could pierce the skin of one of the ships or both and leave the passengers suffocating on empty air.

  And so the shuttle traveled slowly from the Wild Hunt to Julian’s flagship.

  There was no room for anyone but the pilots in the instrument-choked piloting room of the shuttle, and so Constance sat just outside, close enough to look in and speak to the pilots but crammed in with the rest of her people in the main body of the shuttle. This was a small shuttle; she had many that were larger, but she did not want to take a large crew with her today. The space was cramped. Marisol was sitting beside Constance, her shoulder pressed into her arm. She’d thought that Constance shouldn’t go, that the trip could be dangerous, a sentiment Milla’s death had inspired in her, Constance had no doubt. Julian had been Constance’s friend, Julian had been Constance’s ally, and Constance was going to see how he had died.